What is your background? What made you make the jump to entrepreneurship and Nimble Made?
“After I graduated from college, I was working for a few years in a couple of different industries. I started in advertising as an art director, and then I was in fintech for a little bit – I was most recently a consultant at Ernst & Young before I left my job to pursue Nimble Made full-time.
I feel like the entrepreneurial spirit was something that I’ve always had. When I was in college, I was designing a bunch of shirts on the side for different organizations and clubs and selling them…also doing some freelancing on the side too, for anyone who needed logo work or flyers. I think even after college, I was still continuing my freelance design on the side while working full-time at these jobs. I think the dream was to eventually grow my freelancing to a space where I could freelance full-time, but it’s tough to get that initial base of clients coming in. That was really tough for me, to get a freelancing service off the ground.
And so my co-founder, Wesley Kang, and I decided to look into something product based. We were brainstorming a bunch of different ideas and Wesley, prior to working on Nimble Made, was an analyst at Citi Group. He had to wear a dress shirt every single day for work, and this struggle really stemmed from him. He’s probably like 5 feet and 5 inches in height, around 130 pounds, and so he definitely had an issue trying to find a dress shirt. And it sucked, because he had to wear one every single day and just didn’t feel good wearing these really baggy dress shirts from department stores.
[As for entrepreneurship], I think it’s something I’ve always had within me and I’ve always wanted to be my own boss. I’ve always wanted to see where my potential could take me.”
How long did launching Nimble Made take?
“Wesley and I were still at our corporate jobs while working on Nimble Made for about six months. So [it took around] six months to get it off the ground.
We were working pretty hard at our corporate jobs, clocking in full-time hours, sometimes a little bit more. We would get home at 8 PM, 7 PM, eat something really quick, and then clock back in to work on Nimble Made. So I would say that initial stretch of product development, market research, getting the website live to a place where we could launch, getting inventory… that took about six to seven months.”
What has your experience in generating revenue from Nimble Made been like?
“So we’ve been doing this for about a year, full-time; we quit our corporate jobs about a year ago. It’s been pretty amazing.
Sales are always slow at the beginning. I think a lot of our friends, when we catch up with them, they’re like, ‘Oh my god, are you just making a bunch of cash now?’ I’m like, ‘Not even, not even.’ It is a struggle.
We do have sales now, a lot of it has come from the press coverage that we’ve been able to get, with Huffington Post, with MONEY, so those have been really helpful. We’re doing SEO on the side, we’re doing Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads…we’re trying a bunch of different things. I think we’re focusing a lot on our Asian American community as well, and so we partner with similar-interest groups like Gold House.
At the very beginning, we were thinking broadly, [targeting] slim guys in general. But the slim-fit dress shirt market is very saturated. Think about Brooks Brothers, think about J Crew, think about any big label brand out there, they all – for the most part – have a slim-fit line. And while we are also slim-fit, we are actually a bit slimmer than they are, and so it’s pretty tough.
When we started out with marketing, we were having a pretty hard time finding our customers because it was just too much competition. So we decided to be a little more niche about it, and tapped into our Asian American community since we knew that Wesley had this issue, we knew that friends around us who were Asian or AAPI, who had a slimmer stature, had this issue. When we started to roll with that very targeted demographic, I feel like it really took off.”
There are a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs out there that want to start their own business but find it hard to go all-in. Were there any other ideas that came to your mind first before you settled on Nimble Made? How did the idea of Nimble Made present itself?
“I’ve talked to people who are thinking of starting their own thing, but they’re not really sure when or how yet. I think the most common problem is that they are not 100% sure on the idea, and that is what’s keeping them from trying it out.
I totally understand that. Wesley and I were writing business ideas down every day into a list, and tried to decide which one would be the right one, or which one had the most potential. Yes, you can do your research and you can prep, but you can only really know so much. There’s no way for you to really know, or there’s no answer that this is the idea that is going to make it for you.
I’m a very risk-averse person, and so I like to be very organized and very prepared for things like this – I’m not just going to quit my job today if I feel like it. Wesley and I took very, very small steps. He came home from work one day, and he was like, ‘I need to find a better dress shirt that fits me.’ I’m like, ‘I hear that from my dad all the time,’ and I think we just thought it was an interesting idea and wrote it down, thought about it for the next few days.
And then we were like, ‘You know what? Let’s just try it out.’ [We took] really, really small baby steps where we didn’t need to commit to anything big yet. [We started] by doing some research – we got all the stats together, and then asked, ‘What’s the next step?’
The next step would be to see what our first dress shirt would look like. So we looked at competitors, did some research on best-selling types of colors and patterns. Now we had this, what was the next step? ‘Let’s just try to make it, let’s just try to find someone who can maybe make just one of these for us.’
I think we were kind of on this path where we were very careful, because we were still at our full-time jobs and we weren’t really sure about the idea yet. But we were at least doing something and putting in an effort to try. And I think a lot of people get stuck with like, ‘Oh, but I don’t even know if this is going to work. I don’t know if this is the right thing for me,’ but how do you know if you don’t really try?
For people who maybe have an idea, or they have many ideas, I would just say pick one, and do the smallest next step possible, and just keep going from there.”
What is your advice for a young Asian American who is looking towards the next step after graduating college, and potentially wants to get into entrepreneurship?
“I think that if you’re eager, or if you have an idea that you’re itching to create from scratch yourself, I would say… even though I said I couldn’t wait to get out of the corporate space, my corporate experience was so foundational to me creating Nimble Made. I took the [corporate route initially] because I wanted to learn, I was eager to learn. At that point after college, I wanted to be at a company, meet new people, grow my network, learn a bunch of different things, and just talk to people who are CMOs, CEOs, and CCOs – ask them questions, and learn from them. And so for me, I think that was really important. But for others, that might not be.
Whether you’re thinking about starting something right out of college, or you want to invest some time and work at a few companies, either way is fine. Anyone can achieve anything that they set their mind to. Yes, it’s going to be hard; yes, there’s going to be obstacles, but I don’t think that if you don’t do it right out of college, that you’re never going to be able to do it.
Think about what you value. Do you value growing network? Do you value paycheck? Do you need health insurance? If you need those things, yes, get a corporate job first. I think it’s about figuring out what you need and just weighing the pros and cons.”
